A new issue of the Amarok newsletter is out. It talks about interesting new developments, Amarok's Summer of Code projects, the current events in the 1.4 stable branch, and continues to provide cool Amarok-related tips.

Comments

I cannot find where I can set things so that Amarok will remember them for the individual file like KPlayer does in its File Properties. Like if I want to have some presets that I want to be used only for some specific songs but not for any of my other music... Any chance to implement this?

I'm personally looking forward to what QGraphicsView can do for Amarok and Plasma too. Last I heard, work was being focused on getting user interface elements to work well within qgv... if amarok is attempting to embed widgets into the graphics view, perhaps the developers should harass the plasma people to see how they're doing it, if they haven't already. :)

Another nice thing about QGraphicsView is that it allows us to do animations. Given that we've always loved iCandy in Amarok, we're having a lot of fun with adding little touches like smoothly collapsing text boxes.

Also we've added a funky animation on startup, which could possibly replace the splash screen.

Can Amarok compete with iTunes once it is ported to Windows? We'll see.

One reason why Amarok is second class is that with iTunes imports of Cds is so easy. what do we have for KDE? KAudiocreator, a usability hell. Or KsCd for playing CDs which I never run to play CDs on a default installation without tweaks.

Amarok has the potential to replace the crap as iTunes does and go beyond. How good Amarok really performs, we'll see when its ported.

K3b can rip CDs I think. Could be wrong though. But you're right, it should be integrated into Amarok somehow. Perhaps K3b/KAudiocreator and Amarok could share music naming info (i.e. the ~/Music/%artist/%album/%artist - %title.%ext)

I disagree. Because when using Amarok, I don't care about files - I only care about music. Amarok is doing the file-stuff for me. That's part of why it's a great application.
So I don't have the idea to use the filemanager to add the files. And what do I do next to add the music? Well - use amarok anyway to import the music into my collection (because amarok manages my music files for me).

I have a music collection, and I have a musicmanager. If I want to add new music, I'd expect my manager to do it.

And it should be really easy for Amarok to use the audio-kio-slave.

For those, that manage their music by themselves, this may bot be a big issue. But people using Amarok as manager too, this would be a great help.

KAudiocreator works fine for me. Put in a CD, the album and track names appear, click two buttons and it rips in your favourite format. Plus you can customise everything, such as the naming of of files and the encoding parameters, if you like.

If you hate computers you can even set it to rip automatically as soon as the CD is inserted, provided the FreeDB lookup succeeds.

Kaudiocreator works but usability wise it is awful. This also includes the configuration. Usually you want three different issues: lossless, ogg or mp3, and with compressed: quality or size optimized. But you don't have to make these choices each time you rip a CD.

With iTunes it goes like this: You select your default rip format and all the stuff in the settings.

Insert a CD, tracks are displayed. You can play the CD or you press a button to rip the files and automatically add them to your collection. Perfect. Same goes for the player functionality.

Incidentally, what you describe is exactly how KAudiocreator works. Are you complaining about the possibility to set up more than one compression scheme in the configuration? Just delete all but one if you don't like that.

I have no idea what you mean by "usually you want three different issues," each of which apparently at two quality settings. Do you mean that you usually create five versions of every file that you rip?

His point is you shouldn't need to fire up KAudiocreator, Amarok should do it for you. Not sure I fully agree with him, but I think it should be possible to drag the files from the playlist in amarok to your collection or something.

Actually I create 3 different versions: .flac (lossless) which I store at home on a large disk - as a backup for when (not if) my CDs get scratched to unplayability. .ogg with high quality for my laptop (which doesn't have enough space for all my music in .flac, but has plenty for .ogg versions), and .mp3 at fairly low quality that I burn to CD for my car.

I'm sure people with more music devices need more formats customized to the right compromises for each device.

Well, KAudioCreator and KsCD are both based on standard widgets in the KDE Multimedia module. Give them a polish and improve their usability and it wouldn't be hard for Amarok and K3B to re-use them. A while back I did a redesign to merge both KAC and KsCD into one app with what i thought was improved usability, but Aaron shot it down as less usable. Ah well, maybe one day I'll just do it anyway :-)

My main complaint is that the current widgets while having all the features needed implement them in a nightmare GUI that just confuses uses. It needs a good clean-up, better config options, and wizards to walk the newbie through the process. Also, when you enter a CD, at least now you get the pop-up to choose between KAC and KsCD, but its still a pain to switch between them, or to have both open and fighting over the CD.

Hopefully something like the player window will be available in Amarok 2 (whether the player itself of a plasma widget). It makes the app much more 'alive' - without being too distractive.. I've gotten so used to it, I cannot even imagine listening to music without it..

I'd like to see amarok incorporate a toolbar button or keyboard shortcut to TOGGLE back and forth between the playlist window and the mini-player (like iTunes does). It seems pretty useless to have both of them on-screen at the same time, and I think this would be a lot nicer than the current setup.

From the article:
'At the time of Amarok 1.0 the idea was innovative and technology (HTML/CSS) was adequate. As times moved on, and rich “Web 2.0” services began to show up, the current solution seemed more and more limited.'

I don't know how this was figured. Web 2.0 applications are written in HTML/CSS/JavaScript... how can the current solution (a rendering widget with support for those technologies) appear limited in that light? Smooth animations are both possible and easy in with HTML/JavaScript.
What is the real reason the KHTMLPart was dropped?

The new design (http://amarok.kde.org/wiki/Image:Justplaylist.png) is okay, but it seems less functional! One of the powerful things about the current playlist is it lets you sort through your music by attributes. You can reorder songs reorder by length, or track number, or year, or composer. (or bitrate or file size or - well, you get the idea.) It's part of what makes Amarok a powerful "music manager" and not just an "audio player". What if you added a button with a drop down (or pop up) menu that lets you reorder tracks by attribute? That way users could still reorder (sort) songs easily.

Also, rather than the "playing" marker with difficult-to-read-veritcal-text, why not use the cool blue pulsing effect Amarok currently uses? I really like it.

Amarok's done cue files since a while now - not by separating the file into tracks in the collection, but by showing the cue file markers in the context browser when you're playing the song :) Technically, the cue file's filename has to be exactly the same as the music file (so that if you have the file "Great Pianist 20th Century - CD2.flac" your cue file must be called "Great Pianist 20th Century - CD2.cue" - we don't actually look for the cue file before the track is loaded, so we can't use the cue file's information for this purpose)

The idea behind this methodology is fairly simple... If you've got a cue file for something, it is almost always because the tracks are so intertwined that cutting them up would make no sense - so we basically view the cue file entries as a set of bookmarks (like the red markers up in the mockup in this post you hijacked for this support question ;) - might i suggest #amarok on freenode or the forums next time 'round?)